Comparing streaming quality at BAM and BlipTV

[rhoboat.livejournal.com]

At morgandawn's suggestion, I'm posting this streaming quality comparison info here.

A few days ago, jagwriter78 asked the admin at BAM Vid Vault about an issue she had with the frame rate of one of her vids. It looked like during the conversion process, the resulting FLV file had dropped frames. I've seen a few complaints about this elsewhere on LJ.

Anyway, I wanted to confirm if this was true, that BAM's video player drops frames. Jag's "Owen Harper - Deceased" vid illustrates the dropped frames quite well with lots of fast intercutting. I poked around in my cached files and got the FLVs from several sites and used FLV Player to look up the info. By using the cached files versus using various downloaders, I know for sure that these FLVs are what's streamed from each site rather than FLVs that get converted.

Jag's self-encoded FLV:
368x207,
Audio: mp3 at 96 Kbps
Video: On2 VP6 at at 512 Kbps, 25 fps

BAM FLV
448x252
Audio: mp3 at 125.08 Kbps
Video On2 VP6 at 461.84 Kbps, 15 fps

BlipTV FLV
640x360
Audio: mp3, 80 Kbps
Video: On2 VP6 at 400 Kbps, 25 fps

Also on BlipTV is the option to view the original file version if you click on the dropdown menue below the video. In this case, Jag uploaded a WMV file (640x360, 25 fps).

For reference, though I can't do an exact comparison as Jag's vid is unavailable there, I also have a short clip I uploaded to YouTube. It's available in both standard and HD quality.

The standard FLV:
480x270
Audio: unknown codec, 61.11 Kbps
Video: unknown codec, 256.03 Kbps, 30.07 fps

HD
1280x720
Audio: AAC at 44,100 Hz Stereo, 119 Kbps
Video: H.264 (MP4), 29.97 fps

The only difference that I can see between YouTube's HD mp4 file and the one I originally uploaded is that mine had audio at 48,000 Hz.

Comments

[mresundance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was one thing that stumped me about blip. They are not as accessible or user-friendly as Bam, just on a basic "where the hell are things?" level.

[rhoboat.livejournal.com]

Blip.tv is still in beta, so I wonder how many changes will be made. The layout from my perspective definitely needs tweaking. I really do keep asking where the hell things are over there. ^_^